SIGH (Marcelo Amorim, October 2024) The project presented by Gustavo Prata at Soda’s small exhibition room brings together thousands of medicine cards that occupy almost the entire space. At first glance, it seems like a single gesture: creating a shimmering mass of empty cards. In reality, like everything the artist has done recently, it involves a great deal of preparation, precision, and meticulous handling. Gustavo went to hospitals searching donations of empty medicine packs, obtaining a considerable number of bags filled with them. When I first visited his studio, these bags - black, bulky, and stacked - were marked with signs that read "not trash" to prevent anyone from mistakenly discarding them. The packaging - from various sources - still contained a few pills, which were carefully removed by the artist artist, leaving the card completely empty. He then connected them using staples, creating strips composed of transparent blisters and ribbons with a silvery shine that engraved names, compositions and expiration dates. Beside his desk, a small trash container gathered a variety of pills he had discarded. Colorful, white, and potentially dangerous, these remnants were handled with caution by the artist, who wore a mask and surgical gloves while removing the remaining medicines from their packaging. Amid the trash, along with the capsules and the white dust from the medicines, an empty beer bottle and scraps of paper completed the scene. It was like the aftermath of a party that ended on a dark note—a kind of medicine’s Russian roulette. Looking at his studio, with the trash bags to the right of his work desk and the strips of empty packaging piled up on the left, I was reminded of a stage. More precisely, the play “Breath” by Samuel Beckett, the one in which everything is reduced to a final breath, a death rattle, someone's final sound. Written in 1969, “Breath” is probably the world's shortest play, lasting for only 35 seconds. Without dialogue, the author's instructions demands that the show begins with a baby's cry, followed by an amplified sound of inhalation, then exhalation, and - finally - a scream. The stage would be empty, just lit so that the light shines and then fades softly. He also asks for scattered trash on the floor, but nothing occupying the vertical dimension, only the horizontal plane. Here, however, the trash climbs up the walls, and the breath seems to be in the empty packaging and in the echoes of a search for relief or cure. Imagining that all these packages represent people who, at some point, swallowed these pills suggests a counting of time, since they are necessarily consumed gradually, just like salt must be consumed slowly. Seeing them all at once is shocking. Beckett's play is shocking because it reduces an existence, from birth to death, to a single moment concentrated in an absence that is felt through the trail of trash left before us. Gustavo Prata's stage brings together countless moments and vibrates our blind trust in medicines, our desire to believe in an immediate salvation provided by mysterious substances—a fine powder that is granulated, fractioned, and compacted for our ingestion. If we could remember how many pills we have swallowed throughout our lives, how much space would they take up? How long would it take to safely ingest them? The space is full, but the emptiness is manifested in the packaging deprived of its content: pills that have already been consumed, medicines that have already fulfilled—or not—their function. Just as the trash on the stage in “Breath” evokes a life already past, the packaging in Prata's installation are like ghosts of continuous consumption, where the end never seems to come. Both works share a reflection on the ephemeral and the silent impact of seemingly trivial objects and gestures. The artist confronts us with what we often choose to ignore: the fragility of our existence and our reliance on quick and simplified solutions for complex problems.
YOU DON'T FORM THE CRAZY SENTENCES THAT YOU CULTIVATE OUT THERE (Theo Monteiro, August 2024) We are faced with a rhizomatic structure. Chaotic, it spreads in everywhere. With a markedly organic vocation, it does not follow geometries, pre-established designs, or projects. It flows wherever it can, seeping and clinging wherever it can stick. This type of structure does not refer to a specific work by Gustavo Prata: a very expressive part of his poetics occurs in this way. At times, it seems as if the artist seeks, in vain, to establish some kind of control over something that has its own dynamics. It is up to him, and that is where his role comes in, to select the primordial ingredients of these strange structures. This form of composition can be seen in his “drawings,” installations, collages, and structures, refers to forms found in nature on a variety of scales. Whether in the course of a river, a cosmic body, a tree, or a microorganism, the rhizomatic pattern has always been there; it is almost a law of physics that operates without any knowledge of our existence and that, someday, will possibly swallow us whole. Our artist’s raw material, however, has (almost) nothing organic about it: countless newspaper pages, which Gustavo sorts through, cuts out, and constantly engages with. Sometimes, traces of coffee stains can also be found, a beverage as indispensable to our frantic pace of life we live in as newspapers. It is true that, with the rise of digital media, printed newspapers seem doomed to extinction, but its idea, its concept, is still very much alive, perhaps just it has just taken on new forms. In any case, Gustavo Prata's raw material is deeply tied to our daily lives. A daily life where we constantly exposed to headlines, subtitles, teasers, continuous texts, and countless pages. Images appear less frequently, and when they do, they refer to the world of graphic design and cheap, mass-produced visual communication. In this sea of periodicals, one can find allusions to specific episodes or figures. Inevitably, when contemplating these creations, we will spot everyday and historical milestones, after all, everything inevitably turns into these strange and undefined organic, chaotic forms. And this is when Gustavo seems to lose control of what is hapenning. From then on, the process flows almost on its own. What he does is provide the main ingredients. The curious thing is that, even though his poetics works in a biomorphic way, it deals with a type of everyday element that circulates as quickly as its lifespan. News has an absolutely brief existence, much like a cup of coffee. These are things that pass through our lives with frightening speed and, consequently, almost go unnoticed. But for Gustavo Prata, they draw attention. In these structures, especially when we focus at their primary elements, there is a overwhelming amount of information, a cloud of graphic pollution and the complete absence of forms or elements that provide us with a more solid compositional configuration. We are, therefore, faced with a work that frenetically conveys anxiety and instability. The spatial/sculptural creations are sometimes so fragile that a simple gust of wind could destroy everything, leading its structures to collapse. It is worth remembering the song Meu Ego by Erasmo Carlos and Nara Leão. At one point in the lyrics, the duo sings: “There are words, there are letters, but you don’t form the crazy sentences that you cultivate out there.” Indeed, Gustavo Prata enters the scene with words and letters. But his way of tracking how we miscommunicate prevents the crazy sentences we cultivate out there from taking shape.
BEYOND THE OBJETC (Allan Yumizawa, June 2024) Visual artist Gustavo Prata lived and grew up in São Paulo, immersed in the urban flows that permeate his everyday life. Such experiences don’t directly reflect the city itself but perhaps its symptoms; much of his work does not aim to represent the monotony of straight lines and geometric shapes found in the corners of the landscape. Instead, he seeks to infuse everyday objects with a spirit, as a counterpoint to the sensations he experiences in the city. Prata acknowledges the complexity of the marketing industry, which shapes both material and symbolic desires in the collective imagination. His works reflect this understanding, exploring the impact of consumerism on our society. In works such as Amálgama, the artist accumulates and tears up product packaging, fragmenting logos into an abstract composition. This gesture not only questions our relationship with brands but also reveals how they infiltrate our subconscious even when we aren’t directly engaged in their consumption. In a way, it offers a dystopian perspective of our place in the world. Another recurring element in his work is the accumulation of newspapers, which, despite their decline due to the rise of digital media (and predictions of their disappearance within 20 years), still represent a form of consuming information. The artist uses them to explore contemporary dynamics surrounding society's approach to truth and post-truth in the age of smartphones and social media. During his residency at Galeria Karla Osório, Gustavo Prata observed, through his interaction with the gallery’s outdoor space, the potential of using wire as a compositional element in the landscape. The silver hues catch the natural light and the greenery of the garden, creating sculptures of beings from this everyday material. For this, the artist employs a modular logic, where the object undergoes transformations and is later serialized. This approach ensures that his works have no fixed endpoint, allowing them to expand indefinitely by adding more modules. When this occurs, the nearly human (or larger-than-life) scale offers an animistic aspect to the viewer, so that the objects appear to have life, soul, or spirit. As an example, his sculptures made with wire, where the titles always invoke a proper name, such as Theofrastos (2024). The silver lines take on organic forms, and their abstract composition continually offers the opportunity to search for, or even find, human elements. This is also seen in sculptures with interventions, like untitled 2 (2019) from the Cracas series, where a table is modified with paper pulp. These interventions on objects generate organic lines that, while presenting a deformation, also bring a likeness to a living organism. In Prata’s work, these aspects of deformation announce a “predatory nature,” which metaphorically reflects on how consumer society operates in contemporary times. In contemplating the body of work by Gustavo Prata, we are immersed in his daily life, filled with objects, urban movements and relentless geometry. Amid this landscape, Prata finds an escape: creating works that offer what the city often cannot—organic shapes and sinuous elements. His relentless pursuit is to infuse life into the inanimate objects around him, granting them a soul, an animated state that transcends their static nature.
THE INSIDE IS THE OUTSIDE (Paula Borghi, February 2021) The inside is the outside, the name of a sculpture by artist Lygia Clark, lends its title to Gustavo Prata's solo exhibition. Starting from Moebius' tape, Clark's work suggests that our subjectivity is not interpreted as a flattened horizontal line, but rather as a collage of two ends of a tape in a path without end, nor beginning, where one can travel the entire surface of the tape, which appears to have two sides (like the subjectivity of the individual and society), but only has one. Due to its crossed eight format, when going through the inside of the tape it soon becomes the outside and vice versa, being impracticable to disassociate them. That is, the subjectivity that runs through one side is the same as that which runs through the other. In this sense, it is possible to imagine the inside and the outside, respectively, as a metaphor for the artist and his artistic production. Since the surface of the tape appears to have two sides but only has one, artist and artistic production have subjectivities that are intrinsically connected, even if sometimes such perception (spectator) or consciousness (artist) is not evident at first. It is from this image that it is possible to go through the solo exhibition of Gustavo Prata, analogous to the reflection on the Moebius tape, proposed by Clark. Composed of works that are structured through metaphors of paper bodies – more specifically newspaper and packaging products consumed by Prata and friends -, it is true to say that the body of work on display is also the body of the artist. Following in dialogue with Clark, to think about the relationships with Prata works, the artist says the following about her own work: "what moves me in sculpture the inside is the outside is that it transforms the perception I have of myself, of my body. She transforms me, and I become formless, elastic... Your lungs are mine."(CLARK, 1963, n / p) Already in Prata’s work 4080, it is noted that the sculpture consists of several boxes of cigarettes, more precisely 204 boxes of the Marlboro brand smoked by the artist and friends over seven months. The raw material in question is a direct consequence of the act of smoking – four thousand and eighty cigarettes burned, inhaled and exhaled. The result is a kind of pulmonary column that makes up the architecture of the exhibition space itself. While Clark looks at her sculpture and says “your lungs are mine”, Prata brings into space this pulmonary column and shares with the viewer the air, or rather the lack of it. It is in this sense that the two works are able to transform the perception that both artists have of themselves in their own bodies, since the air within comes from outside. The same process takes place in amalgam, but it is no longer about the perception of the body through a specific organ or product, but about it as a whole and consumption in its diversity. One notices here numerous packaging of products, many of them possibly consumed uncontrollably by Prata. The work is built by the desire to fill an insatiable void, amalgamating the artist with a plurality of products of material consumption. It is a predatory body, a human body. A body that seems to have within itself a kind of “bottomless hole” to be filled, as if it were constantly in a state of lack, need, inadequacy and instability. There is a malaise in this body, as if it were gobbling up whatever is convenient for it to ease its pain. And if, sometimes this body devours cigarettes, sometimes it devours chocolates, acai, toothpastes, medicines, soaps, catupiry etc. No wonder these are works that materialize the excessive consumption, addiction, hygiene, compulsion, anxiety and voracity of the artist himself, since Prata's body is the protagonist of his own sculpture, even if on paper. With the same intensity and method as the works carried out with packaging, the newspaper collages are distinguished by a single detail: instead of material consumption products, what is consumed is information. As in Amalgam, where it is not possible to have a complete reading of the packaging, the information in the newspaper works presents its message in a visual cacophony. Once devoured, what presents itself are noises of phrases and words, cut and pasted obsessively. Regarding the formalization of the works, it is curious to see how the materiality and content of each paper are determinants in the construction: there is a kind of bodily elasticity of the paper that seems to guide Prata in his collages, as if the images respond to the artist's gestures, which, in turn, responds to the characteristics of the matter. For example, unlike the packaging of consumer products material, in reverse, it is possible to see both sides of this body on paper, once again highlighting the fact that the inside is the outside. It is as if, as we walk through Prata’s solo, we are led by the image evoked by Clark's work. An exhibition that celebrates the end of one of the many cycles of this artist's production, after an intense and productive artistic residency of five months. Or rather, an ending that is the beginning, according to the image of the Moebius tape.
THE END IS FERTILE (Horrana de Kássia Santos, May 2023) The term Anthropocene designates the period during which human activity has had a significant impact on Earth’s ecosystems and geomorphological processes. Given this ongoing state of transformation in which human experience is implicated, it is urgent to act and propose new strategies for survival, and art is also necessary to nurture possible futures, as proposed by the exhibition “Shadow Zones.” The works of Licida Vidal, Gustavo Prata, and Juliana Brandão share discursive similarities but propagate in distinct ways, thus creating new paradigms for the present. (...) The artist Gustavo Prata manipulates industrial waste from his own consumption to create monumental works that confront everyday perceptions. Prata is a typical resident of a metropolis, interested in observing routine and the most trivial habits, from which he extracts the raw material to establish connections between what is consumption and who is consumed. With compositions that defy peaceful formatting, such as in the work Amalgam (2022), which, like a sinkhole, forms a verbal-organism that hypnotizes the viewer, or when addressing color and shape in the work 8040 (2021), which verticalizes a collection of cigarette packs, Prata elevates the everyday to the highest status. In the work Yesterday (2022), the artist creates a map that alludes to the path of the ancient Royal Road, a land route used by the Portuguese Crown since the 18th century for the transport of gold and precious stones between Paraty (RJ) and Ouro Preto (MG). (...) There is still no consensus among scientists and natural science theorists about the beginning of this new era. Some say the Anthropocene began with the Industrial Revolution, however, it is impossible to ignore the colonial processes and overseas voyages of the 15th century as antecedents to the constitution of this geopolitical scenario. Even so, “Shadow Zones” does not impose a sentence sterile of existences and collectivities, Since it points to the human capacity to conceive a sustainable future for, in this case and in this exhibition, the end is fertile.
